Donald Judd

Peder Bonnier, New York

Poughkeepsie, Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, Refining the Imagination: Tradition, Collecting and the Vassar Education, April - September 1999, cat. no. 106, p. 247, illustrated in color
Poughkeepsie, Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College,  extended loan, 1999 - 2005

With its pristine, geometric forms and intense, resonating colour, Untitled is a majestic example of Donald Judd’s audaciously innovative sculpture which was unilaterally acknowledged as the portent of a new aesthetic era when it first emerged in New York the 1960s. A key figure who dared to change the course of modern sculpture, the inestimable contribution that Judd made to both the lexis and praxis of art is elegantly epitomised in the present work which stands as a totem to the artist’s deeply complex ideology.

Deceptively simple in appearance, Judd’s work is far more recondite and varied than is casually apparent. Underpinned by a strong allegiance to empirical philosophy fostered during his formative years as a student of Philosophy at Columbia University, Judd’s unique syntax of reductive, highly distilled geometric forms sought to divest art of imitative realism and illusionist depictions of space. Rejecting metaphor, allusion and metaphysical speculations in favour of literal truth, Judd sought to replace ambiguity and inconclusiveness with logic and clarity.

Judd’s vertically deployed progressions – the ‘Stacks’ as they have come to be known – are widely regarded as his breakthrough works. He made his first stack in 1965 and by the end of that decade he had established a core vocabulary of forms whose various permutations preoccupied him for the next thirty years, exploiting different colour and material combinations to their full potential in a proliferation of closely related works in the tradition of Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko and Ad Reinhardt. Consisting of ten evenly spaced units arranged vertically on the wall from floor to ceiling, the space between each unit the same as the unit itself, the stacks interrogate the purity of colour and the physical properties of space. As the present work lucidly demonstrates, the multipart sculpture derives meaning from the interaction of its constituent parts; rejecting compositions founded on hierarchical balance, individual elements are neither subordinate nor dominant in relation to each other. Instead, the form of the work is defined by a simple mathematical system, a progression based on simple laws of geometry and proportion which aims at diffusing the metaphysical pretensions of art.  

Judd’s modernist concern for purity and non-illusionist space vehemently contradicted the received ideologies formerly associated with sculpture. Indeed, Judd disavowed the very term “sculpture” which he associated with the hand-crafted art of an earlier era. By contrast, Judd’s simple, declarative, unambiguous forms, for which he coined the term specific objects in order to stress their neutral, discrete nature, more closely approximated functionless objects than traditional sculpture. Untitled does not evolve from an artistic process of carving or modelling; it is not figurative nor is it anthropomorphic. Most strikingly, the present work breaks from convention by dispensing with the pedestal which had traditionally isolated sculpture in an ideal realm beyond the viewer, substituting in its place a direct relationship with the architectural space around it by forging an unmediated relationship between floor and ceiling. Thanks to its geometric format, the distances between the forms become part of the work itself; they function as open volumes articulating the space from floor to ceiling in a progression of open versus enclosed space.

Colour is one of the most salient aspects in Judd’s trinity of values. In an essay on colour he stated: “Material, space and colour are the main aspects of visual art” (In: Dietmar Elger, Ed., Donald Judd Colorist, Ostfildern-Ruit, 2000, p. 79). Although recognised as a sculptor, his work is informed more by painting than a history of sculpture and his declared ambition was to extend the unity, immediacy, scale and clarity that he found in the work of Newman and Rothko in particular. In the Stacks, Judd works with colour pragmatically, in conjunction with form and space. As a series, the Stacks can be seen as an intense, systematic investigation of colour and materials within a given format, a corollary of Barnett Newman’s Zip paintings. Throughout his career Judd experimented with various different combinations, interrogating the different reflective qualities of metals, such as galvanised steel and copper, combined with plexiglas of varying hues and translucency. In the earlier examples the top and bottom surfaces of the units were made of plexiglas with a metallic wraparound, although throughout his career Judd made subtle variations to this format, culminating in the present work in which the entire wraparound is made of deep, midnight blue plexiglas. What attracted Judd to this material was the truthfulness of its intrinsic colour which emanates from within the medium itself, unlike a painted film which masks the material’s natural tones.

In many ways the present work can be seen as the fruit of Judd’s assiduous research. The shimmering, incident-rich exterior of the plexiglas that encases the sides of the units dematerialises its otherwise obdurate, opaque form. The optical quality of the polished plexiglas creates sinuous light patterns of vaporous insubstantiality as highlights glint and surfaces dissolve and then reassert themselves. As the beholder’s eye navigates the crisply delineated right-angled edges and corners of the work the complex play of reflections fuses the sculpture with the surrounding space, the intense blue colour bleeding into the wall and reflecting off the steel top and bottom surfaces of the units, filling the voids with intangible rays of blue light that paradoxically serve to augment the sense of tangible space. In this way, Untitled forms a marriage between material, space and colour – the harmonious expression of Judd’s complex aesthetic.